july73: I think the yardbirds were headed in a zeppelin direction, Jimmy was really taking the helm there. you can really see it in the french tv clip when they do 'I'm confused' and Keith is doing the moans during the bow part. Jimmy didn't want the yardbirds to break up, they were pretty good players with some fame, but he did very well upgrading the members when he put together lz. songs like 'psycho dasies' and 'think about it' are really worthy imo.

Yes, and Jimmy was also proud of them and their live work and was disappointed because they could not capture on tape what they were doing live. He said, they were live much more heavy, experimental and edgier than on record.

oh I agree about where The Yardbirds were headed at the end (& what they were doing, live/onstage), Page's agenda/level of control etc. ... but Led Zep was definitely a new entity, and not only because of the different musician lineup (Jones & Bonham alone are enough to make them an utterly distinct ensemble, imo). different chemistry; new concepts and alternate musical path(s) emerged out of that. never thought of them (as some of the initial LZ observers seemed to have, and as many connections/similarities there may have been) as an 'upgraded' Yardbirds Mark V, or whatever.

would love to see some more of that if at all possible... you can copy the 'IMG' code from the right and paste it in here to get them to show up in the thread. or links is fine with me as well if you'd be so kind.

No problem! I'll give a try to pasting the images right here in the thread. I actually have done that in the past, but given that these need to be bigger than normal in order to read them, I was worried that they'd overwhelm the page layout here (you know what I mean). We'll see what happens - if it's too big, perhaps Jason or a mod could delete them or whatever.

I scanned a page from an old Creem special edition that I've had for years - too much for me to type. The "interesting" review is the one for III.

Thanks for posting all of those Creem reviews, relayer. It is interesting to read the sequential notices of the band's albums from that magazine â€” especially those by Lester Bangs, of IV [briefly comparing Plant's vocals to Iggy Pop's, LOL] and HOTH ... because he seemed to appreciate some aspects of those two releases, just as he did "That's The Way" in his Rolling Stone review of III.

although Burnett (whether or not he saw them in concert) is surely correct in describing the band as loud, which they were ... it's just the kind of typical, categorical remark about Zep's music that has been seen innumerable times:

I feel bad that Iâ€™ve not contributed much to the questions raised by july73. Iâ€™ve got some thoughts on the matter, but they are more â€œinvestigative procedureâ€ thoughts than anything else, and I haven't yet pulled them together. But one broad thought is to compare comments made by the same critic on various bands that toured in Zeppelinâ€™s time and were considered its rock peers.

A narrow case in point: if memory serves, some critics didnâ€™t like Plantâ€™s on stage antics (setting aside the criticisms of mindless screaming). But Plant wasnâ€™t the only guy in that time to â€œwork the mic.â€ For example, Paul Rodgers was no stiff in that department. Check out this video for proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FhCilozomo

So, in terms of bias, it would be interesting to see if a critic panned Plantâ€™s on stage movements, but then failed to do the same for Rodgersâ€™ in a review of a Free show.

^^ see, I think the problem is though, that Zep was on a whole other level (of commercial popularity, that is).

as in: the critic or writer who would be assigned to go and see a Led Zep show, would not be the same type of critic/scribe who'd be sent to a Free gig (and they would at least have heard of LZ ...) As far as writhing lead singers in rock, well the only distinction between Rodgers & Plant to the typical, un-rock-familiar critic was how famous or well-known they were compared to the lead singer for The Rolling Stones.

anyway, reactions of many of these critics to hearing such bands live would be to make the obvious/expected comparisons to Mick Jagger, and then start drawing other correlations to The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, teen heartthrobs ... whatever they would be able to most recognizably (to them) associate what they were seeing/hearing.

even the British blues scene followers & critics seem to have mostly bailed on Led Zep early on, because the band had rocketed to fame so rapidly. Superstardom became a presumed point of distrust, or basis for 'misunderstanding'. (at least, in 1970-71 or so a band such as Free was still seen or reviewed, by favorable observers anyway, in musical terms as a group which had potential to break-progress beyond their mid-level fame.) With LZ, instead of focusing on the whole band's music, it was "oh the guitarist this" and "oh the singer that" and "oh the drummer the other thing" etc. etc. Because in part, focusing on the individuals, as 'celebrities' or 'personalities' of note or whatever, is what sells newspapers (for one thing).

(EDIT - it would be interesting, as chs ^^suggests to find concert reviews of each band's shows which were penned by the same writer.)

still laughing at that one review (blackmikito researched) from a California show, where Plant was likened to Rosalind Russell Either a moment of brilliant insight - or grasping at straws ...

Robert Plant showed up for work 90 minutes late Saturday night. So did his Led Zeppelin cronies Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones. When they finally arrived it was by a massive entourage of bodyguards, publicity flacks, valets and a cast of underlings too numerous nor worth mentioning. But nobody - neither their bosses nor their customers - voiced a single complaint. In fact Led Zeppelin was given the kind of tumultuous welcome at the Pontiac Silverdome that should be reserved for the scientist who conquers cancer or the person who comes up with the formula for world peace. Zeppelin was on the job three-and-a-half hours and then they jumped back into the plane for a two-week holiday in Cairo and London. And their rate of pay was $3,500. Not for the day. Not per hour. That was per minute. Nice work if you can get it. Led Zeppelin, four British musicians, walked onto the Pontiac Silverdome stage at 9:30pm Saturday and walked off at 1:am Sunday with - unofficially - $642,000, their take of the total gate of an estimated $840,000 after bilking 80,000 of their most die-hard fans $10.50 each for the pleasure of their company. The lucky ones - those with the 14,000 floor seats - got to actually see the band but they paid for it by being pushed and shoved by the zealots behind them. The rest - those in the arena seats - were so far away from the activity on stage that the band must have looked like four ants prancing around on top of a marshmallow. The simulcast closed circuit screen overhead was their only assurance that there were; in fact, real live people on the stage. Otherwise, Pageâ€™s guitar would have looked like a double-necked electric toothpick. The screen, which has been used at all the Silver domeâ€™s rock concerts, was originally vetoed by the band. No way, they said, were they going to all the expense of renting the screen and cameras for a lousy $840,000 gate. But the stadium management persisted and they relented. The Pontiac date was the largest venue on Led Zepâ€™s â€™77 American tour. In fact, it was probably the biggest indoor concert ever and the band marked the occasion by doing absolutely nothing special on stage. Their concert set Saturday night was the same routine theyâ€™ve been using all over the country with one exception, a second three-minute encore. The band went mechanically through the motions. They had clearly left all inspiration back on the private plane. There was no art being made at the Silverdome Saturday, only money. The band displayed arrogance and indifference toward the audience which was best exemplified by their over-all air of nonchalance; for instance, showing up 90 minutes after the scheduled starting time. In Cincinnati, just four nights before the Pontiac date, a fan was killed when an impatient throng accidentally knocked him off a tier of the stadium and into the street. After that incident one would expect the band to reduce the possibilities of a similar tragedy. Yet they were unable to get to the hall on time and left the audience hanging. They didnâ€™t arrive at the site until 9:10pm and it was another 20 minutes before they actually took the stage. The band had refused a stadium offer to fly them directly to the parking lot by helicopter to expedite things and instead took a bus. On stage they attempted to create a sense of community but Led Zeppelin, in reality, keeps their distance, compliments of an abnormally huge stage barricade and an army of security personnel. Even the tour manager of the group wanders through the arena with a bodyguard prepared to stiff-arm anyone who approaches. â€œI had an easier time getting to the President,â€ mused a disgruntled reporter after a persistent but futile series of attempts for five minutes of the bandâ€™s time for his readership. â€œEven Zeppelinâ€™s PR people are inaccessible.â€ The band also strongly objected to giving the thousands of Detroit fans who missed out on the sold-out show a filmed documentary. Finally, after three frustrating attempts, one photographer did manage to wrangle his way to the stage to film the band. There were no major incidents at the concert despite the size of the crowd and the delay, thanks to the cooperation of stadium officials, Pontiac Police, and the strangely serene crowd entering the gates like lemmings prepared to fall into the sea or where ever else Plant, Page, Bonham and Jones might dump them.

What is interesting about the â€œreviewâ€ posted by Bong-Man (thanks Bong-Man!) is that it had almost no resemblance to a legitimate concert review â€“ virtually no commentary on the music presented in the concert. The â€œreviewerâ€ did his best at a hatchet job, and he made no effort to sound objective or even to â€œburyâ€ the band based on the quality of their music. His â€œreviewâ€ was really an editorial.

Well, still thinking about this thread . But still havenâ€™t pulled my thoughts together in an acceptable fashion. In the meantime, though, recalling julyâ€™s original post which prompted the more interesting elements of this thread ...

the gist of what july73 wrote:

I'd been wanting to start a thread on a similar, but not identical, topic ... namely, why is there such an impression of 'hatred' or knee-jerk rejection of Led Zeppelin's music by a certain community / camp of music listeners who were in their teens-thru-thirties-or-thereabouts when the band originally became widely popular (circa 1969-1975)?

Some of it, sure, is due to critical ink ... or other 'unthinking' reviews noted on this thread.

But my main question is - why did so many 1960s-era rock music, and music-in-general, listeners seemingly, and/or steadfastly turn against or reject Led Zeppelin as a musical or even creative entity from almost the beginning? ...

The band members ... played a few nights at London's Marquee, to largely good reviewsâ€”and then the easy times stopped. In November, Grant visited New York, where he won Zeppelin a $200,000 advance from Atlantic Recordsâ€”an unprecedented amount for a new act whose first album nobody had yet heard. Even more important, though, were the contract terms that Grant secured: Essentially, Led Zeppelin held all the control. They alone would decide when they would release albums and tour, and they had final say over the contents and design of each album. They also would decide how much they would do to promote each release (not that much beyond tours, though those would be extensive) and which tracks to select as singles (Grant and the band wanted none). A major band would be working for itself, not for a company or for management (Led Zeppelin had no contract with Grant).

However, the Atlantic deal created an image problem for Led Zeppelin that they never got past. The political sensibilities that had emerged in the mix of the counterculture, the underground press and the new rock culture held a great deal of mistrust of and contempt for power and wealth. The band's large advance and its contract cast it as mercenaries in the view of many critics. Even though they were an essentially unknown quantity, Led Zeppelin were being termed a "hype."

All of this took place before anybody had heard Led Zeppelin's first album. Once that changed, it was love or hate, and little in between.

The Atlantic deal had rubbed enough tastemakers on the British scene the wrong way that Grant couldn't get the bookings that he wanted in England. The band played a few dates at London's Marquee, but there were complaints that it was too loud. Grant decided to send the band to America insteadâ€”though this was possibly his intent all along...

Midway through that first U.S. tour, on January 12th, the group's first album, Led Zeppelin, was released in the U.S. It was pretty much unlike anything else. The arrangements were more sculpted than those of Cream or Jimi Hendrix, and the musicianship wasn't cumbersome like Iron Butterfly's or bombastic like Vanilla Fudge's. The closest comparisons might be to MC5 or the Stoogesâ€”both from Michiganâ€”yet neither had the polish or prowess of Led Zeppelin, nor did Led Zeppelin have the political, social or die-hard sensibility of those landmark bands. What they did have, though, was the potential for a mass audience. Young record buyers loved the album, but there were others who did not.

This had to do with various concernsâ€”the hype claim, a conviction that Led Zeppelin were another white British band exploiting black musical formsâ€”but what bothered critics the most about Led Zeppelin was the sound, which was seen as a manifestation of anger and male aggression. Critic Jon Landau described a Boston show as "loud . . . violent and often insane." Plus, there was a trickier element: This was a younger audience than the one that had embraced the cultural and political epiphanies of the 1960s artists. Landau again: "Zeppelin forced a revival of the distinction between popularity and quality. As long as the bands most admired aesthetically were also the bands most successful commercially (Cream, for instance), the distinction was irrelevant. But Zeppelin's enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogeneous audience. That division has now evolved into a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste."

Historically, RS has been no friend of Zeppelin, so one must read anything they publish with a critical eye. That said, perhaps there is quite a bit of truth to this portion of the RS article, especially given the date of its publication (July 28, 2006) and the fact that RSâ€™s â€œrevisionistâ€ album reviews of LZ have become much kinder than the ones originally published. All in all, one canâ€™t help but wonder if this is RSâ€™s unstated apology and explanation for why they dissed Zeppelin early on. In so doing, their mea culpa may prove illuminating to the general question raised by july.

You can read this excerpt and judge for yourself its relevance to july's question. But if there is truth in its content (and almost certainly there is at least some truth there), among other things to consider is the irony of the thought that Peter Grantâ€™s negotiation prowess helped doom Zeppelin from the start in terms of critical success and acceptance by the â€œtastemakers.â€ Sometimes history turns on simple and singular events. Whether or not that is the case here we'll never know, but it's kind of funny to think that Zeppelin's problems with the critics might never have happened if they'd had a less competent manager!

"You're cool when nobody knows about you and only I do because I'm underground which is cool. Now that you're available to the masses - regardless of your musical abilities - you are now un-cool. This now allows me to brag that I knew and liked you when you were a relative unknown and cool and only I knew about you, which makes me even cooler. But now you suck, because everyone's in on it."

^^ you're both right, and (notwithstanding the magazine's chequered LZ past) there is some truth to the RS assertion - which has been made/heard elsewhere iirc - about the band's being signed to the Atlantic label as "the last straw."

but the RS excerpt above also makes its case somewhat unclear ... they're saying (quoting a Jon Landau piece which presumably had been written in the mid-1970s or later) "Zeppelin's enormous commercial success" ... well that would've been later on in the 1970s then, not at the outset of their career, hm?

The strongest/most believable part of this theory seems to be about the timeframe just after they were signed to Atlantic, and the British gig scene, i.e. "Grant couldn't get the bookings that he wanted in England." Then he decided to send them to America ... perhaps this all happening in a few months time did have a big impact on P.G.'s initial business strategy for the group.

They took an ass kicking in the press because they played really loud music for dope smoking kids. I'll take my ass kicking now.... But I know I'm right because I was there. Zeppelin was considered the worst...the heaviest...the hardest...the most freaked out thing you could listen to. I loved them, my friends loved them, but they were not considered the kind of band a person listened to if you really knew and liked music, they were thought of as being a band that played "head" music.

They took an ass kicking in the press because they played really loud music for dope smoking kids. I'll take my ass kicking now.... But I know I'm right because I was there. Zeppelin was considered the worst...the heaviest...the hardest...the most freaked out thing you could listen to. I loved them, my friends loved them, but they were not considered the kind of band a person listened to if you really knew and liked music, they were thought of as being a band that played "head" music.

Getting stoned and playing records......namely Zep was the shit!!! I miss those days! (My mom would knock on the door, "That's not cigarette smoke I smell in there"....then go away. That was about it...except for about 4 years of us playing hide and seek w/ my bong. (she was afaid to throw it in the trash...thinking the trashmen would call the cops and get her in trouble....so she'd hide it....I'd find it, she'd hide it again...and so on. (today, we both laugh about it )

Good post Miss P. And it is true. Shure they were all the rage of boisterous youth.....but when I look through my older brother's yearbooks from 72-77......out of every page of 50 faces.....maybe 5-10 on every page were the types you'd see at a Zep show.....the rest were cleancut looking types. Like watching the movie Dazed And Confused....you get the sence the whole town was made up of those long haired rock and roll loving, partying characters.....but they were the minority. And they were looked down upon from the norms of society. But that minority.....they were a dedicated bunch......and nothing was gonna stop them from going to that concert..it was the place to be, and they HAD to be there..they would lie,cheat,steal, or fuck their way in if they had to. (again, like in the Movie Dazed and Confused....when the coach tells Pink to get that letter of intent signed to play football, he says, "sorry, I gotta go...gotta get Aerosmith tickets".

Plus......there's no data on this, but IMO, Zep's current cool factor and general population uberpopularity did'nt come to fruition until the late, late 70's. By then they were the talk of everyone in the hallways of highschools around the country....not just the heads smoking a quick pin joint in the breezeway between classes. From looking at RIAA's certification timetable......the first album to recieve a Platinum award was actually Presence!!....Then TSRTS! They were'nt the biggest selling band in the US during the 70's.(that would be ABBA).....but they did outlast everyone...sales wise....save for the Beatles. It was just as much the younger brothers and sisters of the 70's generation that made them the bigtime sellers they now are. But by the 80's..it had already become "ok" to listen to Zep by many critics.....many who had suddenly changed their tune from earlier negative press....and by then, rock radio was playing them round the clock.....and they have'nt stopped since.

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